[SOLVED] Tor IP Rotation in Python - stem.SocketError: [Errno 61] Connection refused

I am writing a webscraper using Python and Beutifulsoup.

It was not long before my IP got blocked. I now need to rotate my IP so that I can connect to the website and scrape the required data.

I mostly followed tutorials and git repo documentation:

I am just following the tutorials line by line, not 100% certain if I am doing the right things.

I have set the torrc file to:

# This file was generated by Tor; if you edit it, comments will not be preserved
# The old torrc file was renamed to torrc.orig.1, and Tor will ignore it

ClientOnionAuthDir /Users/user/Library/Application Support/TorBrowser-Data/Tor/onion-auth
DataDirectory /Users/user/Library/Application Support/TorBrowser-Data/Tor
GeoIPFile /Applications/Tor Browser.app/Contents/Resources/TorBrowser/Tor/geoip
GeoIPv6File /Applications/Tor Browser.app/Contents/Resources/TorBrowser/Tor/geoip6

ControlPort 9051
HashedControlPassword my_hashed_password
CookieAuthentication 1

The my_hashed_password I got by running tor --hash-password my_password.

I went on to create a config file in the directory where privoxy is installed with the following content:

forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

Every time I change something in these two files I run a short script to restart the services and call privoxy to check everything is ok:

brew services restart tor
brew services restart privoxy
privoxy

When I run a test script:

import time
from urllib.request import ProxyHandler, build_opener, install_opener, Request, urlopen

from stem import Signal
from stem.control import Controller


class TorHandler:
    def __init__(self):
        self.headers = {
            'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.73.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.1 Safari/537.73.11'}

    def open_url(self, url):
        # communicate with TOR via a local proxy (privoxy)
        def _set_url_proxy():
            proxy_support = ProxyHandler({'http': '127.0.0.1:8118'})
            opener = build_opener(proxy_support)
            install_opener(opener)

        _set_url_proxy()
        request = Request(url, None, self.headers)
        return urlopen(request).read().decode('utf-8')


    @staticmethod
    def renew_connection():
        __TOR_password__ = 'my_password'
        __TOR_hashed_password__ = 'my_hashed_password'
        with Controller.from_port(port=9051) as controller:
            controller.authenticate(password=__TOR_password__)
            controller.signal(Signal.NEWNYM)
            controller.close()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    wait_time = 2
    number_of_ip_rotations = 3
    tor_handler = TorHandler()

    ip = tor_handler.open_url('http://icanhazip.com/')
    print('My first IP: {}'.format(ip))

    # Cycle through the specified number of IP addresses via TOR
    for i in range(0, number_of_ip_rotations):
        old_ip = ip
        seconds = 0

        tor_handler.renew_connection()

        # Loop until the 'new' IP address is different than the 'old' IP address,
        # It may take the TOR network some time to effect a different IP address
        while ip == old_ip:
            time.sleep(wait_time)
            seconds += wait_time
            print('{} seconds elapsed awaiting a different IP address.'.format(seconds))

            ip = tor_handler.open_url('http://icanhazip.com/')

        print('My new IP: {}'.format(ip))

Note: I have tried both TOR_password and TOR_hashed_password.

I receive the following output:

"/Users/code/venv/bin/python" "/Users/code/proxy_rotation.py"
My first IP: 185.220.101.16

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/code/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/stem/socket.py", line 535, in _make_socket
    control_socket.connect((self.address, self.port))
ConnectionRefusedError: [Errno 61] Connection refused

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/code/proxy_rotation.py", line 48, in <module>
    tor_handler.renew_connection()
  File "/Users/code/proxy_rotation.py", line 29, in renew_connection
    with Controller.from_port(port=9051) as controller:
  File "/Users/code/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/stem/control.py", line 1033, in from_port
    control_port = stem.socket.ControlPort(address, port)
  File "/Users/code/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/stem/socket.py", line 503, in __init__
    self.connect()
  File "/Users/code/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/stem/socket.py", line 172, in connect
    self._socket = self._make_socket()
  File "/Users/code/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/stem/socket.py", line 538, in _make_socket
    raise stem.SocketError(exc)
stem.SocketError: [Errno 61] Connection refused

Process finished with exit code 1

I would appreciate some assistance in:

Resolving this issue and use Tor to rotate my IP
Any suggestions on a better way to rotate IPs with Python on a local host. Ill place it in a docker container when I have this working

Thank you